Re: user sees \xxx but is thwarted from searching for them

From:

Eli Zaretskii

Subject:

Re: user sees \xxx but is thwarted from searching for them

Date:

Wed, 17 Apr 2002 13:18:06 -0400

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 10:04:50 -0600 (MDT)
>
> I was in such a situation yesterday. Normally I use latin-1 encoding but
> switched to language environment latin-9 to edit some files containing
> Euro
> signs and forgot about this change. Then I loaded a 400 line DOS file
> containing "-*- coding: cp850 -*-" in the first line. Emacs encoded all
> the
> umlauts already in the file as latin-1 but encoded the typed umlauts as
> latin-9. And after minor changes all over the file and a few interruptions
> I didn't remember which parts were changed and which were old ...
>
> Does anyone have an idea for what we should do about this?
Help Handa-san make the switch to Unicode ;-)
The problem is that the target charset of cp850 is Latin-1, not
Latin-9. OTOH, in a Latin-9 language environment, non-ASCII
characters typed by the user are by default converted to Latin-9
characters.
> Does the change to turn on unify-on-encoding fix this automatically?
Yes, as long as the user doesn't type characters that are unique to
Latin-1 and to Latin-9 (like if they use both the currency symbol and
the Euro symbol in the same buffer). That is, assuming that the
result, probably UTF-8, is not what the users expect.
> Will the switch to native Unicode fix it?
Yes.